The 2022 National Carer Survey received over 6800 responses from carers, including 1356 from carers living in Victoria (20% of all respondents). Perhaps unsurprisingly, surveyed carers often reported concern about their financial situation – 1 in 2 reported financial stress, while 1 in 7 reported financial distress.
While sobering, the findings of this survey affirm the importance of the work that FCVic has been undertaking in our two carers projects – Financial Counselling and Carers and Standing Strong – both of which aim to connect unpaid carers to financial counselling assistance and to build financial resilience amongst this cohort.
Our work in this domain has included the development of a dedicated Carer Pathway to financial counselling assistance, which allows carers and carer support workers to warm refer to the Consumer Action Law Centre. In addition, we have begun a suite of outreach opportunities for financial counsellors (which you can read more about in this month’s Devil’s Advocate), which will connect carer support services to their local financial counselling agencies. Further work, which will roll out in the new year, will use public libraries as hubs for connecting to hard to reach carer cohorts, such as older carers, and carers from CALD communities.
In this way, we hope our work is able to directly address some of Victorian carers’ more immediate anxieties.
To read more of the findings from this survey, Carers Victoria has produced a summary of Victorian results, available here.